Stuart Wagenius « The Echinacea Project

Good news for science at the Chicago Botanic Garden

The Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Foundation is giving $8 million to help build a new science building. The 35,000 square-foot building will house laboratories for the Garden’s research team, classrooms, an expanded herbarium, a plant science library, and an enlarged seed banking facility. Read the detailed press release.

Friday the 13th

Kite Aerial Photography is not going well. Friday the 13th was a particularly bad day.

MORNING: In the morning Josh, Julie & I drove to NNWLF. We set out ground markers and got the kite up. After we got the camera up we realized that the remote control wasn’t going to gain us much with the canon S70 because it take about 10 seconds between shots in the RAW mode. The interval on the timer is about 15 seconds. Then the camera battery ran out ARG. So, we went back to lunch.

AFTERNOON: Armed with fresh batteries we went back to NWLF and set out the ground markers, got the camera up, and took a lot of shots. Or so we thought. When we returned I found that there were no photos on the card. We’re not sure what happened. Perhaps the LED didn’t trigger the sensor. The problem was we didn’t check. ARG.

EVENING: Julie & Josh painted the kite line at 10 meter interval, so we could gauge the height of the camera. When the paint dried, I went out the roll up the string and found it was in four pieces. Some animal had chew through the line in several places. ARG.

Well, we are learning a lot. We have a long way to go before we are a well-oiled KAP machine.

Of course there was a fine finish to the day. I was working on the computer and got distracted for a few minutes. Then I heard thunder in the distance and the power went off for a few seconds. I lost the first version of this lament. I then pulled the plug on all computers and went to bed.

Common Garden Management Notes

Here are some notes including completed management and what’s left to do…

7/12/07 2:10 pm
The crew did a great job weeding Melilotus & Carduus yesterday and the day before. Very thorough job! They started cutting woody veg. Ash and Sumac are prevalent. Some others woody species include Salix, Rubus, Vitis, Ulmus. I looked where the single Toxicodendron plant used to be. No sign of it. I haven’t seen it for several years.

I systematically walked the garden looking at these groups of rows: 56-51, 50-47, 46-43, 42-39, 38-35, 34-31, 30-27, 26-23, 22-19, 18-15, 14-11, <11, >56. I was searching for Lotus and gopher mounds.

7/12/07 3:13 pm
I removed Lotus corniculatus from these locations…
row pos
52-53 905-906 veg removed
54.5 973 veg removed
48 908.5 pla removed
29.5-30 872.5-873 plas & veg rem
17 954.5 pla rem
18 955 veg rem

I noted gopher mounds at these locations. Not all of these are active. I think there are many more ground squirrels than pocket gophers.
row pos
55.5 981.5
45.5 924
43.5 925
43.5 926.5
43.5 930
43 930
44.5 931
46 983
42.5 930
42.5 928
42 948
40.5 923
39.5 921
39.5 916
36.5 921
36 927
37 928
36.5 929
34.5 932
36.5 985
37.5 985
36 983.5
33.5 983
33 932
26.5 912
16.5 885
56.5 915

Note: a huge Thamnophis radix emerged from a hole at 28 940.

In the future–make a plant species list for the common garden. Here are some notes:
Helianthus sp & Galium boreale at 12 889
Stachys palustris in r16 p885
Lathyrus venosus & Galium boreale at r55-56 p970-973
Oenothera biennis at r9 p880
Spirea alba r 57 p973

What is that cf. caprifoliaceae on e side?

TO DO LIST ————
Continue cutting woody veg.
Staple 98 garden.
Remove thistles on W edge.
Remove Phalaris patch r38-39 p~875.
Cut trees in ditch.
Girdle trees E of CG.
Make ladder stairs for S entrance.
Remove Cottonwoods from ditch.
Remove fenceposts.
Remove rebar posts & put in posts along edge.
Put signs along road (& E side?).
Intall webcam.
——————————

On 5 July 2007 Amy & Gretel found a harvested head in a bag from last year. They brought in the bag. Here’s their note:
Mp0418
hdandbag
many achenes loose
many seedlings
25-972 flagged
16 seedlings at least

I noted the coordinates for seedling cluster:
r25.29 p971.63
and there’s 1 seedling 13 cm NE’N of main cluster.

Ideas for highway corridors

The Federal Highway Administration is seeking input about how to prioritize research on highway corridors and the environment (e.g vegetation, wildlife, wetlands, endangered species, brown fields, and water quality).

If you have any ideas, send them a comment.

They are interested in comments on big ideas, not proposals, before AUGUST 24, 2007.

I think we need to know more about how corridors of native plants along highways affects bees and other pollinators, including threatened insects. Also, does planting hardy native plants save money by reducing mowing and weeding costs? Do native plantings make driving a more pleasurable experience?

I’m also curious about the effect of planting native plants in highway corridors near native remnant prairies. On one hand, larger plant populations might improve the survival of plants and animal in the remnants by increasing the habitat area and expanding pollinator populations. On the other hand, planting non-local seed sources next to a prairie remnant might introduce genes into the local remnants that might reduce plant performance (growth, disease resistance, etc) and possibly hasten the demise of a plant population in the native remnant.

Internet down at Andes

We haven’t been blogging for quite a few days now because the internet has been down at Andes. Apparently the technician from Gardonville Cooperative Telephone Association couldn’t figure out what’s wrong, so he went home.

Here at research central, we’ve been luckier. No visits necessary from Runestone (but no time to blog either). When service is back up, we’ll have lots to write about, including:

1. Our trip to Pembina to monitor Gretel’s orchid management experiment. (We saw a prairie chicken and sandhill cranes, but no moose).

2. Failed attempts at kite aerial photography on Friday the 13th. (Plus details about what we learned in the process.)

3. Reports from the Bee team on their successful tracking endeavors.

4. A recap, or three, of BSA meeting.

5. Weeding & other adventures in the common garden.

weeding

I arrived in Chicago and am getting my presentation ready for the Botany meeting.

I heard that weeding went well today. Gretel said you all got a lot done. I know it’s hard work. Did the 30-40 mph winds help? I miss being there.

Aerial photos of the common garden…

… are boring.

I took about 118 photos this afternoon and the > 100 straight-down shots are not interesting. Straight-down shot will provide good data when we have the ground markers and get enough shots in the right places. But for visual appeal & interest, the photos are boring.

Flying the kite was fun. It was cloudy with 10 – 15 mph winds from the N – NNW. It was a challenge to get the FF16 kite up–a 15 minute ordeal. But when it got up, it stayed. It was tiring to take it down and then it easily went right back up again. I took shots of the CG and then went to Staffanson.

Here’s one of the few shots with the camera tilted. I like it.

This is a view of part of the common garden from the West. The rows are 1 m apart and those things are tripods for the video cameras. The tripods weren’t in use today and have plastics bags over them. Flags are more visible than the Echinacea plants. But If you click on the thumbnail, you’ll be able to see some flowering plants in the larger image.

Independence day picnic

We had a great picnic at Elk Lake Beach on the fourth. The wind off the lake was refreshing & would have been great for kite flying. Instead we ate great food, sat on the dock, swam, kicked the soccer ball, tossed a disk, and ate great food. The company was marvelous: Amy, Colin, Dwight, Gretel, Hattie, Ian, Jameson, Jean, Josh, Julie, Per, Pete, Rachel, Sarah, & Stuart. Folks stayed for about four hours and some got a little too much sun. The water was pleasantly warm, but a little greener than usual. I didn’t take any photos.

Plans for the week

Here’s a list of our objectives for the week. Our goal is to gain greater understanding of the ecology and evolution of plants and their associated insects in fragmented prairie habitat. This week will be a peak flowering week for Echinacea this year (1 – 2 weeks earlier that most years). We will spend most of our time observing things related to reproduction. Get down, Echinacea!

Flowering phenology–successfully mating depends on being at the right place at the right time. We can map _where_ all the action occurs later, because our plants don’t move much. Now, we have to figure out _when_ the action is happening and which plants are participating. Some plants are almost done flowering and others are just thinking about flowering.

Style persistence is a signal of which plants are not receiving compatible pollen. We can quantify SP at the same time we observe phenology. We will make phenology and SP observations in the common garden on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday and at Staffanson on Tuesday & Friday.

We will set up ~10 video cameras in the common garden each day. Each camera will be trained on a specific head to watch for pollinator visits. If we can figure out how, we will post a video online for your viewing pleasure.

The Bee Team will mark bees on Monday morning and probably Tuesday too. They will train all of us to make good observations and record high-quality data. We will do that all week. Here’s the link to _the_ online bee identification resource for Eastern North America. This is a great resource!

http://stri.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?search=apoidea#Identification

(It’s certainly good enough for our purposes in western Minnesota.)

The KAP team will take photos of our remnants, if the wind allows. They will be all ready to go when it does. We’ll be keeping track of local weather. Here are some key resources:

Kensington general forecast and 48-hour surface wind forecast (from NWS in Minneapolis).

Hoffman general forecast and 48-hour surface wind forecast (from NWS in Grand Forks).

Current conditions at nearby weather stations.

We will take head photos for symmetry measurements in the afternoons. Colin, now that you made one rig, could you easily & quickly make another one? If so, we could have two pairs of folks taking photos.

One afternoon we will take data on herbivory of ray florets in the common garden.

If weather on Thursday permits, we will take a field trip to visit the Western Prairie Fringed Orchid and help Gretel monitor her long-term experiment.

If it rains this week, we will weed sweet clover & thistle in the CG right after the rain stops–or during if there is no thunder. Bring gloves!

Finally, everyone will post a profile with a photo.

I am looking forward to the coming week! I’d better get some sleep so I can appreciate it.

Recap

We have finished two weeks of the summer field season and I feel like we haven’t settled into a routine because we have been doing something new and different each day. It’s exciting.

Here’s a recap of accomplishments this past week…

Last week we finished searching for plants in the recruitment experiment. One plant (of ~1000 still alive) is flowering this year; it’s the first plant in the experiment to flower! The plant germinated in spring 2001.

Our high tech endeavors are underway and we have computer infrastructure to support them. Josh has networked the computers, hard drives, and printer. After some anxiety-inducing modifications to the video camera power supplies, we started taking video of pollinators & other visitors of Echinacea heads. Andy previewed a video this morning and it looks great! We still need to get more reliable power sources, but video cameras sure beat sitting on a bucket.

Colin has developed a camera rig to take shots of Echinacea heads in the common garden. We will be able to quantify many aspects of radial symmetry in the heads with the resulting digital images.

We assessed herbivory of ray florets in the common garden. We also looked at damage to disc florets. Jameson began to classify types of damage, but there weren’t that many heads with damage to the disk florets.

The KAP team (Julie, Rachel, and Josh) has made progress. Wind conditions have kept the kites on the ground most days, but they are making ground markers and have prepared the camera and rig. I flew the Sutton FlowForm 16 today in 12-16 mph surface winds at the park in Hoffman. Wow, it can pull. Yesterday, Gretel & I flew the G-Kites Dopero in somewhat variable winds. It was nervewracking.

The Bee team (Amy, Ian, Jameson, & Gretel) has abandoned my (bad) idea of watching bees through binoculars in favor of their much better idea. They are marking Agapostemon virescens individuals with acrylic paint and watching them when they are on the heads. They marked two bees on Friday and saw one on Saturday. Cool. They also have a slick form for entering observations.

We all have been making systematic observations of flowering phenology and style persistence of all plants in the common garden and along a transect at Staffanson Prairie Preserve.

In case anyone was wondering about the ostensibly narcissistic streak in recent posts, I _asked_ everyone on the team to post a profile with a photo.

Good work team Echinacea! We are making great progress in our quest to gain greater understanding of the ecology and evolution of plants and insects in fragmented prairie habitat.

Categories

Experiments